


Didn't Mean to Make You Cry

by Elfwreck



Category: Wayne's World (1992)
Genre: Angst and Humor, Bad Puns, Dysfunctional Family, Found Families, Gen, Gift Fic, Grief/Mourning, Orphans, Twenty Years Later, Wakes & Funerals, Yuletide, jumping the shark, yuletreat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-21
Updated: 2014-12-21
Packaged: 2018-03-02 14:51:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,448
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2816093
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Elfwreck/pseuds/Elfwreck
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It starts when Garth attends Wayne's funeral.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Didn't Mean to Make You Cry

**Author's Note:**

  * For [kristin](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kristin/gifts).



> Aaaargh this was supposed to be a fun and cheerful thing and it's so, so not! (Hopefully it's not too much angst.) A--- helped it pull out of its downward spiral and get back on track. And c--- helped tweak the rest of it and did much valuable handholding, because _this was not the fic I set out to write_ , which was 500-ish words of cute dialogue where Wayne and Garth reviewed The Hobbit and talk about hobbit holes. Instead, my brain refused to cooperate and I got this instead. I do hope you enjoy it.

Garth fidgeted in his suit and pondered Wayne's life. He'd been a roadie with a few bands, and eventually found a spot on radio for a while, and recently had been podcasting and doing youtube reviews of tv shows and movies. Alone. He was pretty successful at it, if by "pretty successful" you allowed for a 1-room apartment in a crappy part of town, after the child support payments. But he'd seemed happy enough, every couple of years when he and Garth got together.

He'd kept trying to get Garth to come do vidcasts with him. He'd done one, a few years ago, for some kind of movie awards show, and Wayne kept saying "we should do that again," but now they never would.

Garth had a career. It might not be the most important, or the coolest, but it got the bills paid, even if he did have to wear a suit. (He never could figure out why suits were required for data processing, but apparently they were. Sometimes he'd look around the office and wonder why they all put up with it.) He'd stopped putting products in his hair and let it stick out how it grew, and was glad he wasn't alone in reclaiming the early 90's "this is my hair; deal with it" style. 

Now he was glad he had suits. He'd feel horribly out of place at Wayne's funeral in a flannel shirt and jeans, even more than he already did, surrounded by the relatives Wayne had been avoiding since they were teenagers.

And Wayne's 13-year-old kid, who looked even more uncomfortable than Garth felt. He was wearing a thrift-store suit that looked like it'd been bought yesterday. It probably had.

Garth had never met the kid before, whose name was Radcliffe, because his mom thought he looked like Harry Potter when he was born. Wayne always referred to him as "my little Wayner;" everyone else called him "Rad." 

His mom had been a drummer, a "free spirit" whose band had a couple of albums that hit the charts, and then faded back to playing local bars. Garth had the impression she'd seen even less of Wayne over the last ten years than he had, but the kid was about to enter high school and the two decided they should be responsible parents for once and arrange for one address for him for the next four years.

And then there were the sharks. 

They'd met in that seaside motel, the one where Wayne always said the kid was conceived, and something about the moonlight or the stars or the surf had convinced the two of them that they should go surfing at midnight. Naked. On a broken car door, because neither of them had a surfboard. In shark-infested waters. While eating sushi.

The coroner said their injuries showed they'd managed to jump high enough that the sharks could only bite their feet… at first. 

Garth had seen the headline "TRAGIC SHARK ACCIDENT" followed by "Local couple eaten by sharks during nude midnight sushi surf party" and was about to email it to Wayne because "naked surfing with sharks" had to be the most bitchin' possible way to die… and then read down to find out that, whoa, that was Wayne. Which was still a bitchin' way to die, but it really sucked that it had to be him.

Both funerals had closed caskets. Garth understood that her funeral was much larger, with all her friends in the band and her family and many of her fans… but the boy was here. Her family wanted nothing to do with him.

Neither did Wayne's, most of whom didn't know the kid existed. One of his mom's cousin's had dropped him off here, and would pick him up later.

Lost in his thoughts, Garth heard nothing of what the minister had been saying, and that was probably a good thing. Anyway, he was wrapping up, and most of Wayne's family was moving away. None of them spoke to him; none of them even looked at the kid.

Rad looked at Garth, and said hesitantly, "You knew my dad, right?"

Garth looked at him--he looked so much like Wayne had all those years ago that it hurt. "Yeah."

"Could you… could you tell me about him?" 

Garth started to say "Jesus, kid, not _now_ ," but then the kid looked at the ground.

"Nevermind. I know nobody wants to talk about him. Nobody ever wants to talk about him."

"Hey, no," Garth said. "It's just…" Just _what_ , his mind said? Too soon? Too intense? My best friend who I haven't spoken to in two years is dead and I don't want to face that? _Time to man up, Garth._ "So, does that mean nobody told you about the time we broke into a cemetery crypt for our Halloween show?"

The kid looked up at him. "No way."

"Way."

The kid smiled, and it looked almost nothing like Wayne, and Garth decided that was a good thing.

"How about I take you out to lunch after this?"

The smile broke into a grin. "That'd be awesome!" And then he dialed it back. "I mean… if it wouldn't be too much trouble. Or cost too much."

"Hey, no--I've got it." Jeeze, what kind of life did this kid have? 

They shuffle towards Garth's car--Mirthmobile IV, sans painted flames. In fact, nobody even knew Garth had named it Mirthmobile. Garth talked about the Halloween episode that almost got them busted. 

"So there we were, duck-taping glowsticks to the walls to make the lighting all spooky-like, and Wayne was using a rock to hammer one into a corner and it broke, and we were like 'whoa!' when the green stuff spilled out and it was still glowing. So we broke a couple more and painted 'Wayne's World' on the walls, only it was kinda drippy and hard to read, so we sorta outlined it with a Sharpie, only the ink mixed with the green stuff and got kinda drippy too, and we didn't have a lot of battery on the camera, so we just set up the lawn chairs inside ’cos we the couch wouldn't fit and started taping--"

"That's your car? It's kinda cool." Rad dragged Garth out of 1993 and back into the present. But it was to compliment his car, so that was okay.

"Yeah? You like it?" Wayne was the only person who liked Garth's taste in cars, which ran to tiny and weird-looking. Maybe that was only because of the fond memories he had of the first Mirthmobile, but he didn't care.

"It's not fancy," the kid said, and then seemed to realize that could be an insult. "I mean, it's not trying to impress anyone. I mean--" the kid's face was turning red now, so Garth interrupted him.

"Yeah, I get it. We're cool." And the way the kid looked up at him at that, eyes wide and full of gratitude like Garth had done him a favor by not being insulted because the kid liked his car, made Garth want to punch his mom's whole family, which was a really weird feeling for Garth. So he jumped on the first other idea that came into his head. "Pizza. You like pizza? We could get pizza for lunch."

The kid blinked, so Garth must still not have mastered the "change subject smoothly" thing that everyone else could do, but then the kid said, "Sure, I like pizza. Who doesn't like pizza?"

"Wayne's cousin Cameron," Garth said darkly, before remembering he didn't want to think about, much less talk about, Wayne's family. "But that's not important. What pizza place do you like?"

"Um, Pizza Hut?" 

"Cool. I think Pizza Slut is having one of those two-for-ten deals right now," he said absent-mindedly as they buckled in. Whoops. Wayne always called it Pizza Slut, but that didn't mean he should say that in front of a kid…

The kid giggled, though. "Pizza Slut. That's funny," he said.

"Yeah? Your dad came up with that." 

That sobered him quickly. "Oh."

"Hey, no, I didn't mean--"

"No, it's okay. It's just… I only met him a few times. He and my mom… didn't get along."

"Yeah, I knew that." After the child-support lawsuit and Jennifer hooking up with whatsisface in The Band, Wayne had avoided her. He liked his kid, but then Jenn moved to Chicago and Wayne only had a car about half the time, he mostly stopped visiting. He talked about "my totally Rad little Wayner" sometimes; Garth knew he cared about the kid. He never even bitched about the child support payments. He just… well, he was Wayne, and Wayne and parenting weren't a good combination.

Garth was quiet until they got to Pizza Hut--the one in Aurora still had booths and tables--and they went in to order. "Pepperoni okay?" he asked, because anything more complicated meant choosing and he didn't want to think that much, and he was pretty sure the the kid didn't want to think either, but hey, maybe the kid was a vegetarian, and here he was, trying to push animal meat on Wayne's maybe-vegetarian kid, and what kind of friend was he anyway--

"Sure, I guess," the kid said, so he must not be a vegetarian after all. 

They got to the front of the line, and Garth mumbled "two medium pepperonis for here" before he looked at the name tag of the guy at the cash register. 

Jacques Sheet rang them up and said "$10.83, please." Garth couldn't help it; he started cracking up. He started fishing through his wallet and waited for Wayne to say something, because Wayne was always clever with words… and then remembered he wasn't here with Wayne after all, and his face fell; he stopped moving.

While he was frozen, and the guy was looking at him like he was kinda crazy (and maybe he was, because who starts laughing and then stops for no reason in a pizza place), Rad stepped forward. "Hi, I'm Rad Campbell," he said, sticking his hand out.

"Um, hi?" said the counter guy, and shook his hand warily.

"Thanks. Now when I start high school next year, nobody can say I don't know Jacques Sheet." And he started snickering.

So Garth snickered too, and handed the guy (Jacques, _Jacques Sheet_ ) some money while the snickers turned into laughs and Jacques looked at them sourly, but Garth didn't care because this was the first good moment in the last four days. They were both still snickering when they found a booth and sat down, and Garth said, "Rad, you really are rad."

Rad preened. "One does try," he said, and that both sounded like Wayne and it didn't, and that was kinda perfect.

They talked over pizza. Jennifer's family had always hated Wayne, and right now Rad was crashing on Jenn's sister's couch because nobody was sure what to do with him. He was pretty sure they were gonna turn him over to social services later in the week, as soon as they figured out that Jenn didn't have a million dollars squirreled away somewhere. It looked like Jennifer wasn't much better at parenting than Wayne, if this was what her kid was stuck with. 

Garth found himself nodding sympathetically, and before he knew it, he heard the words "well, I guess you could stay at my place" fall out of his mouth.

Which was probably really stupid--Garth knew nothing about teenagers except that he'd had a great time being one, but everyone said he had done it all wrong--but at least he had an actual guest room. Couch surfing sucked. 

"Oh, could I?! That'd be AWESOME!" 

So they made it happen. Garth, awkward as hell on the phone, managed to call Jenn's sister whose name he could never remember (Sylvia? Cynthia? Sondra with an o?) and say, "Hey, so, Rad's kinda tuckered out after all that pizza we ate, and it's kind of a long drive back to Chicago, so I was thinking maybe he could stay here tonight, and--"

"Sure. Whatever. Keep him as long as you like." She hung up on him.

He turned to Rad. "Whoa. She really _does_ hate you." Rad nodded. "So, um, hey, let's get you set up in here…" and he fidgeted around the apartment until the guest room had clean blankets and a lack of stereo parts on the bed. They talked some more, mostly dodging around the subject of Wayne, Jenn, or families in general, which meant Garth probably bored the kid half to death trying to describe spreadsheet migration, but eventually, they both went to sleep.

That night, Garth dreamt of Wayne. That, in itself, wasn't unusual; Garth had dreamt of Wayne three times this week already, but those were blurry memories and Garth figured they were just his subconscious trying to come to grips with Wayne's death, or something like that. Free therapy, only it was probably worth what he was paying for ’cos he certainly wasn't feeling any better when he woke up in the mornings.

This was different. Wayne was floating in space, surrounded by a gently glowing white aura, and maybe had wings, and definitely had a silver tinsely halo over his head. He grinned at Garth.

"Whoa, dude, are you an angel now?" Garth said.

"Yes, Garth," he said in a lofty, angelic voice. "I have returned from the Lands Beyond the Sky, to share my wisdom with you."

"No way, man. Every time you shared your wisdom with me before, we almost got busted. And one time I had to scrub all the bathrooms at Lincoln Hall."

Angel-Wayne looked offended--and then relented. "Okay, fair enough. No wisdom. But I got a favor to ask you."

"I dunno. The last favor you asked me to do wound up with us being chased across Grant Park by angry chimpanzees."

"No chimpanzees this time, okay? I need you to help me out." He looked serious. Well, he was still smiling, and had that halo-thing going, which was kinda goofy, but he had his patient, serious face on, like he was waiting for Garth to figure out something important. Wayne was always patient when Garth didn't catch something right away.

"How can I help you out? You're dead!" And then it all came crashing back. His best friend--his only real friend, ever--was dead, was never coming back, and he'd wasted all those chances to talk with him, to hang out and watch bad tv shows together; he was never going to find another friend like Wayne and life was going to just _suck_ now--

"Garth! Hey, Garth! Earth to Planet Garth! Telegram to Garthistan!" Wayne was trying to get his attention, and here he was ignoring the real Wayne in front of him, well, in his dream in front of him, while he got all emo over the one he'd lost; Garth was a terrible friend and Wayne was right to leave him--

"GARTH!" 

He looked up at Wayne, who had his hands on his hips and his wings flaring out behind him, his face a picture of exasperated fondness.

"Whoa. You look awesome. And kind of scary. Please don't smite me."

"I'm not gonna smite you. I need you to pay attention. Do you have any idea how much it costs to arrange a dream-visit like this?"

"Well, no, ’cos I'm not dead," Garth said, quite reasonably he thought.

"A lot. It costs a lot."

"There's money in heaven?" Garth had never really considered the afterlife, other than a vague belief that it was full of good things, like hot chicks in bikinis, and it meant not worrying about money. Now he'd have to figure out whether you could take it with you, or if he needed some kind of holy bank account. He tried remembering when he'd last been to church.

"No, Garth, there's no money. It costs… well, that's complicated. The point is, I won't be able to do this again, so it's kinda important that you listen."

"Okay, Wayne. I can listen." Listening to Wayne, as opposed to taking his advice, had never gotten Garth in trouble. Well, there was that one time with the cellphone, when those were new and they both got unlimited minutes for the first time, but that wasn't exactly the _listening_ that got him--

"Ahem." 

"Oh. Right. Sorry. Carry on," Garth said, trying to give Angel Wayne his full attention.

"It's about my boy."

"Rad? He's, well, he's rad."

"Hell yeah he is! That's my little Wayner!" Wayne's face lit up like he was talking about his favorite band, but then it fell. "And I wish I'd spent more time with him, but I can't change that now."

"Yeah, you really dropped the ball on that one, buddy." 

"I know, and I'm sorry."

"You screwed the pooch there." Garth rarely got to call Wayne out on his mistakes; it usually went the other direction.

"Yeah, I kinda did."

"I mean, that pooch was so screwed, you could use it for drywall." Now he was on a roll. "You could put it in a glass with orange juice and make a screwdriver. You could--"

"Garth." Wayne really was being uncharacteristically patient. It was starting to freak him out.

"Hey, I don't catch you messing up often. You used to catch me messing up all the time."

"Yeah, I did, and no, you don't, but I really don't have a lot of time here. You're going to wake up in a few minutes."

"I am? Whoa, do you know the future now? Can you tell me who's gonna win the World Series next year?"

"I don't--Look, Garth, I need to watch out for Rad for me."

"What do you mean?" Garth narrowed his eyes. Nobody ever asked Garth to watch out for anyone. Or anything, for that matter.

"He needs someone. I'm not there. Jenn's not there."

"Yeah, about that--is she with you?"

"No, we're not together."

"Whoa, so she went to the Other Place? An' you went to heaven? Wow; she must've been an even worse parent than I thought!"

"No, she's not in the 'Other Place'. She's just not with me."

"So are you in the Other Place, and you just look like an angel because you're trying to trick me? Out, damned fiend! Begone! Get thee behind me!" Garth made a cross with his index fingers. Wayne failed to vanish.

"I did say I was an angel, Garth."

"Yeah, but you could be foolin' me. You used to do that a lot."

"Yeah, well, I've stopped now."

"Promise?"

"Yeah, I promise."

Garth took a breath. "I miss you."

"I miss you too. And I miss Rad, even though I really wasn't a good dad to him. And I need you to take care of him."

"Wayne, I can't-- I'm not-- you know I'm no good with kids." Or adults. Or much of anyone else. He had some buddies from work; sometimes they went out and had drinks or went to movies, but mostly he just lived alone and went to work. It wasn't an exciting life, but it was okay.

"You don't have to be good with kids, Garth. You just need to be you." 

"I don't understand." Garth's brow wrinkled. "I mean, he's a kid, and if you need me to take care of him, I gotta, whoa, I'm gonna have to--"

"Don't think too much, Garth. Just… just be yourself. Keep an eye on him, okay?" Wayne was starting to fade out, to get bright. 

"Wait, don't go!" 

"You'll be excellent!" Wayne gave him a big double thumbs-up, and started glowing until everything was made of light, and then everything went blurry with rippling chiming notes echoing through his head.

Garth woke up alone in his room; it was just starting to get light outside. He couldn't do this. He didn't even know _what_ Wayne wanted him to do--if that really was Wayne, and not just some weird dream, or worse, some demon pretending to be Wayne. 

He tiptoed into the living room and peeked into the guest room where Rad was sleeping. He thought about what Wayne was asking him to do (because really, it had to be Wayne) and it was too big, too much… "I think I'm gonna hurl," he whispered.

"Well, lean out the window if you are," mumbled a sleepy voice from the bed. "I don' wan' any on me."

And just like that, Garth decided he could live with this. Whatever "this" turned out to be.


End file.
